Casey Seiler: Reason for panel is elusive

Published 2:24 pm, Saturday, January 16, 2016

It's the old metaphysical question: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Here's a changeup for the state Legislature: If a standing committee never meets, holds a hearing or takes any action whatsoever, does it exist? Specifically, this question applies to the Senate's Ethics Committee, which as far as I can tell after weeks of inquiry lacks a reason for being.

On Wednesday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo rolled out a bevy of reforms designed to curtail the most egregious forms of public corruption. In the Senate, most legislation covering such topics is vetted by the Finance Committee. To be sure, financial concerns have been at the heart of most of the convictions of public officials that have rocked Albany in recent years — mostly personal finance, either of the wayward lawmakers or their relatives.

But Cuomo's ideas won't be examined by the Ethics Committee, which a GOP spokesman told me is not empowered to vet legislation. It apparently exists to examine ethics charges against the chamber's members.

The committee's last hearing appears to have been held in 2009, when it was chaired by (yes!) the aforementioned John Sampson, convicted last July of obstruction of justice and lying to federal investigators.

The committee was chaired through the snakebit 2015 session by Sen. Tony Avella, a member of the Independent Democratic Conference who was tossed from the chairmanship a few weeks after the Republican majority slapped down his request to actually hold a hearing.

Despite his apparent suspicions of linkage between those two facts, Avella didn't mention his dismissal until he was contacted by a New York Post reporter in December. This was just after he appeared as a witness at Skelos' trial, where he bemoaned the impotence of the Ethics Committee.

On Monday, Avella joined a bipartisan group of lawmakers at a Capitol news conference to unveil plans to begin the process for amending the state constitution to allow for voter recalls of elected officials "for cause," including infirmity or violations of their oaths of office. It is unlikely to pass, but what the hey.

I showed up at the event in part to ask Avella if he would continue to take donations from Glenwood Management, the real estate giant at the center of the corruption cases against Skelos and former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. Avella has accepted $40,000 from Glenwood's stunning array of LLCs since 2012. At first, Avella insisted Glenwood had been neither indicted nor convicted of wrongdoing. Several reporters noted that wasn't surprising, considering that its senior vice president, Charles Dorego, received a non-prosecution agreement in exchange for his testimony. The firm's centenarian overboss, Leonard Litwin, was referred to as a "co-conspirator" during the Skelos trial, according to The New York Times.

Asked about Dorego's non-prosecution agreement, Avella said, "That's news to me for the first time."

I don't toss around the word "flabbergasted," but it accurately describes my reaction. Dorego's deal had been reported endlessly since Skelos' arrest in May. Dorego and Avella had testified on the same day. I errantly wondered if I should also break the news to Avella that Elvis Presley was dead.

There were only two possibilities: Either the Queens lawmaker was deeply incurious about current events, or he thought the people of New York were too stupid to tell he was lying. Disturbing either way, right?

Also at the event was Sen. Phil Boyle, a Long Island lawmaker who had been Avella's predecessor as chair of the Ethics Committee during 2013 and 2014 — both banner years for public corruption in the Senate.

I asked Boyle what the Ethics Committee was for, and he said, "Theoretically, to look at the ethics laws that are coming." He acknowledged that no ethics bills were sent to the committee during his tenure; the committee had also failed to delve into any of the charges leveled against any of the senators listed above over those two years, though Boyle and the committee's ranking Democrat, Michael Gianaris, had reached out to federal prosecutors to see if, y'know, there was anything the Senate should do.

I'll ask it again: If the Ethics Committee can't consider bills and is reluctant to examine the ethical lapses of members of the chamber, what is it good for — except to fill a page on the Senate's website?